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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
  1. Creators/
  2. Simon Willison — Creator of Datasette; co-creator of Django/

Quoting Drew Breunig

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-08-29)

  • The arrival of powerful, high-cost AI models like “Fable” signifies “The End of the Free Lunch” in AI development, ending an era where rapidly improving, cheaper models made optimizing development practices seem unnecessary.
  • Drew Breunig notes that prior to Fable, developers felt it was “silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies” because new models would frequently “paper over most of your problems.”
  • The high cost of Fable, even with its capabilities, necessitates a strategic shift to “think about what work went where,” prompting a re-evaluation of using “good enough” models like Opus, 5.6, K3, or GLM for most needs and investing in development optimization.